When I’m brainstorming, I still find paper to be a pretty effective tool. 

Way back in 2001, I read an article in Wired Magazine about a company called Anoto.  The company had developed a rather interesting take on pen based computing: they made special paper.  Seriously. 

What they did was create paper that has tiny dots printed on it.  The dots are set up in such a way that they can provide a precise grid reference within an area of ~2 Million square miles.  They combined that paper with a pen that contains a small camera, allowing instant tracking of the pen’s movements.

Back in 2005, Wired had an article about Leap Frog in which they mentioned the "Fly Pen".  This was a kid-friendly version of the idea from Anoto (with technology licensed from them).

Version 2 of the Fly Pen was recently released, and it’s $75.  You can take a look at the LeapFrog Fly Fusion "Pen Top" computer on Amazon.com.  It’s available from all kinds of high street stores such as Target too.

Logan and I became proud owners of Fly Fusions today, and DAMN it is a slick piece of technology.

Since it’s for actual kids, not adults that didn’t grow up, it comes with a bunch of kid targeted software.  Yes, software.  You access the software by drawing a command. For example, "SP" in a circle activates the Spanish language software.  You can navigate through a menu by tapping above or below the circle, and select menu options by tapping to the right of it.  When the translator is activated, you write a word in English and the pen tells you the Spanish equivalent and will spell it for you.

You can write simple math expressions and it will calculate the results.  There are also additional applications you can buy that add other functionality to the pen, such as statistics, a thesaurus and French language translation.

The pen is worth the money based solely on its ability to  archive your written notes.  Just connect the pen to your PC via a mini-USB port, and you can upload pages of notes to a PC (no Mac support, but Parallels runs it just fine).  From there, you can save a page as an image or convert it to text.  You can even convert it to text with images and send it straight to MS Word.

Here’s a scan of a page of my crummy handwriting:

The text conversion gets this result:

BEHOLD! THE Power of this Bloc!

As you can see, I have bad hand-
- writing.

Here Is a typical "command":

And you can indicate which part of the page is an image

Very cool!

Here are the results of the "convert to jpeg" option:

And last, but not least, here’s a screen grab of the text plus images combo exported to MS Word:

When you connect the pen to your PC, each page with writing on it is automatically detected and uploaded (uploads from the pen to the PC are very very fast).  And all you need is the pen and a special notepad.

Apparently Anoto have been licensing this technology to a bunch of folks.  So if you’re too much of a snob to carry a big kid pen around, you can go with something more like this…

If you’re a big note-taking scribbler like me, you should really check this thing out.

Categories: Old Posts
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